


Harbor

by sanguinity



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bodyswap, F/M, Fluff, Handcuffs, High School AU, Hurt/Comfort, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 17:33:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1558469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of short, stand-alone, tropetastic Joan/Marcus stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Harbor (bodyswap)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beanarie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/gifts).



> Relevant summaries, tags, and warnings included in the notes for each chapter.
> 
> Each story is (expected to be) a stand-alone; there's no reason to wait for the whole collection to be published to read any given one. The [chapter index](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1558469/navigate) might be helpful for jumping to the story you were looking for.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Walking a day in someone else's shoes is supposed to bring you closer together, but Joan fears it might destroy what they have built.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Angst, comfort, able-bodied people having feelings about disability  
> ~1200 words
> 
> Set a couple of years after [Foundations](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1175130). You only need to know that Marcus's arm never got much better than what we see in 2x11, and that Joan once flirted with him by comparing him to her gross anatomy cadaver. As one does.
> 
> Originally posted at [tumblr](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/77870288510/fic-harbor).

The instant before the glass falls, she knows that it's going to happen: she reached with the wrong hand again, carrying through with the motion before proprioception could tell her that no, she didn't have a solid grip after all. She watches in frustration as the inevitable unfolds, the glass slipping from her hand, striking, shattering. Glass shards and water scatter across the kitchen floor. 

She takes a deep breath, trying to suppress her reaction. She has no business complaining, and she  _won't_  complain. Marcus has to live with this every day. 

She hears her own chuckle from somewhere behind her. "Maybe I should nip back over to the apartment and bring over my old plasticware." It's her voice, of course, and what she wouldn't give for it to be Marcus's. She misses the comfort of his rumble.

"Don't bother," she says, trying for light, but she can hear a thickness in his voice that shouldn't be there. "It was Sherlock's. Hell, we should break all his glassware for getting us into this mess." She eyes the cabinets speculatively. It's all Sherlock's, of course, and it would be so damn satisfying to watch it all shatter.

"Hey, now," Marcus says, and it's her voice still, and she hates it,  _hates_  it. It plays badly in her head, too much like that first long year after she killed Gerald Castoro, when she pushed everyone away and only had herself for comfort. Marcus's steps are wrong as he crosses the kitchen—too light, too quick—and when his arms wrap around her it should feel more  _secure_  than this. His voice should rumble right in her ear, not be this higher and lighter one spoken from somewhere behind her shoulder. "It's okay, baby," he says, and this time she hears his accent, his rhythms, and that helps a little. "We'll get this fixed. Sherlock is working on it triple-time, and you and I are no slouches, either. And then everything will be back the way it should be and I'll spend all my time marveling at the way you live your entire damn life in three-inch heels."

That earns him something between a laugh and a sob: the first thing he did,  _after_ , was take too long of a step and fall on his butt. Joan's muscle memory took over soon after that, but they had taken only one look at the staircase before retreating to dig out a pair of ballet flats from the back of her closet for him. And then he slipped on the stairs anyway, expecting traction that wasn't there. He's been wearing her running shoes ever since.

She turns in his arms, letting her head rest in the crook of his neck and shoulder, focusing on the sensation of being held. There's comfort in a hug, almost irrespective of the body doing the hugging. "It's not the same thing, and you know it." She kicks petulantly at his running shoe. "I can take the heels  _off_."

He's silent for a long moment. 

She's known from the start that pitying him for his arm would kill the thing between them. Or, flipside-and-the-same, considering him brave for living with it. And here she is, two days in, a barely-contained mess of everything she had promised herself she would never feel. Angry and frustrated, and guilty about both. Determined not to feel sorry for herself, but having disallowed pity for herself, it only swirled around until it became pity for him _._  Because—and it kept coming back to this—he had to live with this  _every day forever._  That was the mantra in her head that she couldn't shut down, as she kept being brought up short by his arm:  _he has to live with this every day forever._  

Walking a day in someone else's shoes is supposed to help you understand them, bring you closer to them, but Joan fears that living in his shoes is going to destroy what they've built over the past two years. It will, if she can't get her head under control.

She begins to apologize and pull away, but his arms tighten around her, pulling her back. He presses a kiss to her temple. "Stop it, Joan. What's happening now, that isn't what it's like for me. It's only been two days."

She makes a derisive noise into his neck, because that's exactly the problem: it's only been two days.

"I spent a whole lot of time in occupational therapy, plus  _therapy_ -therapy, plus a whole lot more just walking around in the world. I know some things you don't know shit about. You remember what you said about your gross anatomy cadaver?"

She groans. "Oh,  _god_. Don't remind me." She had tried to tell him that his arm was  _sexy_.

He laughs. "Okay, there might have been some fetishization going on there." He presses another kiss to her temple. "I forgive you. Even the great Joan Watson is allowed to screw up." 

She lifts her head enough to press a kiss to his neck in return, intensely grateful that he knows all her failures and flaws and shortcomings, and loves her anyway. She is luckier than she deserves.

"But it's true, our bodies shape us. Two days, all you know is what it's like to live with that arm for two days. Two years, three years, it's a different thing. Do us both a favor, don't try to extrapolate."

He pulls far enough back to see her face, then laughs. "Okay, that's weird, seeing me cry." 

She laughs, too, even if it's watery. "Any less weird than seeing me wandering around in the middle of the day without any make-up?"

"As if you're not every bit as gorgeous without it," he teases. She wants to cry again, and tucks her face back into his shoulder instead. Even if it's all wrong, there are still some things that are right.

"You've always shown me the respect of not pretending to know how it is for me," he whispers into her ear. He gives the nape of her neck an affectionate shake, but there's a sternness in his words, a warning that she's standing on the line. "You  _still_  don't know how it is for me. Capisce?"

"Capisce," she agrees. They stand there a moment longer. "Can we do a  _Godfather_  marathon tonight? Because I've about hit the end of—"

"God, yes," he agrees. "Me, too. And that  _asshole_ —" he pitches his voice to carry, "—isn't invited. Sherlock, stop lurking behind the door."

She pushes back from Marcus, wiping her eyes, as Sherlock steps into view, looking abashed. "You, ah, appeared to be having a moment."

"And you appear to not have any manners." Marcus stands belligerently between them, giving her a moment to collect herself. Sherlock shoots her a skittish look over Marcus's shoulder. She tries to dredge up a smile for him. She's still furious at him and his fucking mad-science experiments, and when this is over she's going to lay down some rules that will make the harshest institutional review boards look like pushovers, but she can concede that it's been a bad couple of days for Sherlock, too.

"Tell me you've got some good news for us," she says.


	2. Well-Dressed Man (handcuffed together)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> God love a well-dressed man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hurt/comfort, blood  
> ~1300 words
> 
> Orginially posted at [tumblr](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/86557172168/fic-well-dressed-man).

Joan made a soft, unhappy sound, and Marcus felt a rush of relief. He hadn't been able to do much more for her than monitor her pulse and respiration—with the limited movement the cuffs gave them, he couldn't even get her into the recovery position—but if she was regaining consciousness, then the blow to her head wasn't as bad as he feared. 

Her eyes fluttered open, and she frowned. In pain or confusion, he couldn't tell which.

"There you are," he said. "I've been wondering when you'd stop being such a lazybones. How you feeling?"

"Not great," she winced, and tried to lift her handcuffed hand to her head. He went with the motion the couple of inches he could, then his cuff clanged against the radiator, jerking her motion up short. She frowned at her wrist.

"The baddies got the jump on us," Marcus explained. "I'm never gonna live this down at the station, held prisoner with my own cuffs. How's your head?"

She used the other hand to prod at the back of her skull. "Hurts. Concussed, probably, but—" she flinched as she did something particularly painful, and Marcus winced in sympathy,  "—probably no worse than that."

He nodded, trying not to let his relief show too much. He had hoped for no worse.

"You?" she asked, looking properly at him for the first time. 

There was no hiding the mess they had made of his face, and while she couldn't see the loosened tooth, she could probably hear the bloody lisp he couldn't quite control. "I'm good," he told her, which wasn't  _really_  a lie, because most of his working pieces were still working. "I've just been sitting here contemplating how the other half lives." 

He could tell she wasn't at the top of her game, because the joke distracted her from trying to figure out how baldly he was lying. "Criminals?"

"Consultants," he said, rattling the handcuffs against the radiator. She gave him a weak smile. "Gotta say, I've never been abducted before. How many times is this for you now? Three?" He knew of at least four.

She thought about it. "Four," she corrected him, which meant that the thinky parts of her brain were still working properly. "And at least twice for Sherlock," she said, then sat up with a start. "Sherlock! We've got to get out of here."

"Why?" he asked with a sinking feeling. "What happened to Holmes?" He had been hoping that Holmes would figure out where they had gotten to before too long, and raise the alarm.

"Hopefully nothing," Joan said. "He just really doesn't like it when I've been kidnapped."

Marcus wanted to raise his eyebrow at her, but his face hurt too much. "Not to belabor the obvious, Joan, but none of us are exactly happy when you're kidnapped." 

"Yeah, but I can trust  _you_ ," she said. _"He_  makes bad decisions."

Marcus figured that he shouldn't feel a flush of pride about that— _makes better decisions than Holmes_  wasn't exactly a glowing testimonial—but he liked the sound of Joan trusting him.

"Am I hearing this right? You've been kidnapped, and you're worried about his well-being?" 

"I'd just like to get out of here before he—" with a sideways glance at him, she bit off the sentence. "Like I said, bad decisions."

Something massively illegal then. Perhaps even torturing-Moran levels of illegal: he had never bought Moran's story about all that. But it was the expression in Joan's eyes that said it all: worrying about Holmes was a way to sidestep being afraid for herself. He nodded. He'd play along with whatever it took to get her through this. 

"Then we'd best get ourselves loose and go save him from himself," he agreed, and her tension eased slightly. "You happen to have a plan for that? Because unless you've sewn a handcuff key into the hem of your skirt, I think we're stuck for the moment."

Startled, she turned to consider him, then her eyes dropped to his neck.

He frowned at her. "What?"

She twisted her wrist to look at her cuff. When she couldn't see what she wanted to, she cocked her wrist and peered at it again. "Are these stopped?" she finally asked him.

The light wasn't  _that_  bad. "You having vision problems?"

Her body language suggested that yes, she was, but that she wanted him to believe it was inconsequential. It was difficult to chew her out for that when he was hiding injuries of his own. 

"Are these stopped?" she asked again, insistent.

"No. They don't much care if we get nerve damage or not, I guess." 

She was staring at his neck again. "Would you, by chance, be wearing collar stays?"

He reached up with his free hand, flipped up his collar tip, and slid out a stay.

Joan beamed at him. "Oh, God love a well-dressed man." She took it from him, the steel glinting in the light. "Look at that. You are a wonder, Marcus."

"That's me, your friendly neighborhood double-oh, with all kinds of handy gadgets hidden in my clothes. What are you going to do with it? Dismantle the radiator?"

She grinned. "I'm going to shim the cuffs." She twisted around, awkwardly trying to reach the brick wall behind the radiator.

He took the stay back off of her; he could reach the wall better than she could. "What do you need done?"

At her direction, he began filing off the stay's shoulders against the brick, narrowing its point. Fortunately, it was fairly mild steel. "Sherlock teach you?"

"Not really. He's got a thing about Houdini. I picked up a little along the way, in between putting his joints back where they're supposed to go. Here, give it, I think that's good."

It took some finagling to get his cuff where she could reach it properly. If her wrist hadn't been slim enough to slip through the radiator, they might not have managed it. She ran her fingers around the nearly non-existent gap between his wrist and the cuff and made a face. "Be grateful I was a surgeon, they didn't leave me a lot of play here."

He grimaced. "My fault, sorry. I was fighting at the time."

"Hey, if that kept them from setting the stops..." She was fiddling with the cuff mechanism now. The ratchet clicked a notch tighter, and she swore.

"Take your time," he coached. He couldn't see what she was doing—there were too many hands in the way, plus the bulk of the radiator—but he could feel the tiny, precise movements of the cuff against his wrist. The muscles in her forearms were rigid from the required force, and she had her eyes shut, to better visualize what she was doing. Her look of concentration was gorgeous.

A long couple of minutes went by. Then the cuff silently, miraculously glided open, and his hand was free.

"Joan Watson," he breathed, "you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met."

It wasn't until she flashed him a startled, pleased smile that he realized he had said it out loud. He obviously wasn't functioning at the top of his game, either.

"Maybe you should save that kind of talk for when I don't have a head injury," she chided.

"Maybe I should," he agreed. It might also be nice to not have a mouthful of blood. Just in case.

She threaded her arm back out from the radiator, but didn't bother spending the time to free her own wrist from the other cuff. Instead, she tucked the free cuff up into her fist like a makeshift set of brass knuckles. 

He nodded in approval. "You keep the shim, just in case." If things went wrong again, then they'd each have one. "I mean," he gestured to his swelling eye, split lip, and the blood on his shirt, "the look's pretty much ruined anyway."

She gave him a hand up, and he tried not to wince as he clambered to his feet. "Oh, I dunno," she said. "You make it work."


	3. Chance and Chemistry (highschool AU)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joan glances at the stage and comes to a dead stop: not only does the singer have a voice like Sinatra, but he has a face like Brando.
> 
> Guys and Dolls x Charles Augustus Milverton.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first meetings, no warnings  
> approx 2850 words
> 
> A bit longer than I intended, but it ran away with me. For the record, it is *very* weird to write CHAS for a pairing other than Holmes/Watson -- CHAS is a very slashy story! -- so if this comes off as a bit more OT3 than pure Joanbell... well. It's only to be expected, I suppose.

Sherlock is insistent that he needs up on the school roof, and so Joan agrees to help him break into the auditorium tech booth: it has a trapdoor up to the stage rigging, which itself has access directly to the roof. Standing lookout while Sherlock picks the booth’s lock, Joan notes with absent approval that whoever is on stage is doing a credible job with “Luck be a Lady.” She doesn’t usually have opinions about old Hollywood musicals—she only has an opinion on _Guys and Dolls_ because she is amused by its conjunction of Sinatra, _The Godfather,_ and the corniest version of the mafia ever filmed—but she will never forgive the film for casting a nasal croaker as the dreamboat Sky Masterson while letting the dreamboat _voice_ in its cast languish on comic patter songs.

Whoever is onstage is a far better choice for Sky than Marlon Brando was, she can tell that even from outside the auditorium. When Joan and Sherlock finally gain access to the booth, she glances at the stage through the window and comes to a dead stop: not only does the singer have a voice like Sinatra, but he has a face like Brando.

Well, okay, he looks nothing like Brando—besides being short and black, the actor has a babyface that Brando never had—but he is still one of the prettiest boys Joan has ever seen. He moves like Sky Masterson ought to, too: effortless sex-on-legs confidence, but tinged with the uncertainty of a man who, for the first time in his life, is about to get an ear full of cider.

She doesn’t realize she has stopped to watch until Sherlock comes back for her. He looks from the stage to Joan and makes an expectant noise. When that does not rouse her, he tugs Joan’s sleeve. “Watson, the _roof_ ,” he pleads.

The number finishes in a hash of bungled choreography. The director bellows his dismay at the dancers, and Joan follows Sherlock up through the ceiling hatch.

 

Joan quickly forgets about the singer. In addition to her SAT prep, she is taking a full load of AP math and science courses—she’s determined to get into Columbia pre-med—and chasing Sherlock across rooftops is the only thing that makes her courseload bearable. Between school and Sherlock, there really isn’t any time leftover for boys. (Or rather, there isn’t time for the rites and rituals of boy- _catching_ : Emily has offered to coach her, but Joan can’t bring herself to invest the time.) Even so, when the posters go up around school advertising the opening of _Guys and Dolls_ , she stops to look.

“Marcus Bell,” Sherlock intones from behind her shoulder.

“I can read as well as you,” she tells him.

“He’s newly transferred from Sinatra Arts,” Sherlock adds, because _of course_ Sherlock saw that she was interested and decided to do a complete background check. “He has a brother in our year. Andre, one of the shop kids, I wouldn’t think you know him.” She doesn’t. Sherlock seems to know someone in every social group, including those who seldom show up for school, but that’s hardly surprising given his own sketchy attendance. “And in addition to being a competent baritone, which you already know, he’s also a JV wrestler.”

Joan makes a soft noise of approval. She should have recognized his physique: the wrestlers are all very lovely to look at, just as long as one keeps one’s gaze below the neck. Not that there is any reason in the world to ignore Marcus Bell’s face. “Junior?” she asks. Seniors are usually given a varsity spot out of courtesy, if nothing else.

“Sophomore.”

So not just a baby _face_ , but an actual baby. “Why’s he here?” Joan asks, because kids who get into the specialty schools tend to stay there.

“Some drama with his brother. You should ask him out.”

“Excuse you?” Joan turns to look at him.

He shrugs. “Maybe it’ll get Emily off your back for ‘letting me see other girls.’”

Joan rolls her eyes. It would get Emily off of _his_ back, too, which is probably more important to him. “C’mon,” she tells him, “we’ve got class.”

 

Joan buys a ticket for opening night. Much of the show is a hot mess, but Marcus Bell is as strong a Sky Masterson as she hoped. Happily, whoever was in charge of costuming found a suit for him that actually fits: pressed and tailored, he’s even prettier than he was in rehearsal.

The next afternoon, while Joan works through a set of distance-velocity-acceleration problems at the kitchen table, her mother asks, “What’s that you’re humming?”

Joan plays back the last few notes to herself. She blushes furiously to discover it’s “I’ll Know.”

“Nothing, Ma,” she lies. “Just something that’s been playing around school.”

“Mm,” Mrs. Watson says, giving her daughter a considering look.

She sees the show again that night. She’s not fangirling, she swears: it’s just that Brando as Masterson bugs her _that badly_ , and she’ll enjoy the fix-it while she has it. The show only plays for another weekend, after all.

At intermission, she finds a text from Sherlock, wanting to know where she is. By the time the house lights come up after the final curtain, she has received two more. She steps out onto the front steps of the school to find Sherlock lounging against a wall, waiting for her.

“You really should ask him out,” he says. “I haven’t seen you crush on anyone this hard since Rosa.”

Her back goes stiff. She’s in no mood to talk about Rosa. “What did you want?”

Sherlock glances around at the thinning crowd. “This way,” he says, and he leads her back around a corner to a spot of relative privacy. “I have strong evidence that the school nurse is part of a blackmailing ring.”

 

For two weeks, the blackmailing ring takes up all of Joan and Sherlock’s time. (Although Joan still manages to discover the location of Marcus’s locker: upstairs back hallway, near the chemistry classroom.)

“Shouldn’t we just take what we have to the police?” she asks Sherlock. She has met some of its victims, and is just as eager to see this set right as he is.

“The police can’t do anything unless the victims are willing to make their secrets public. And if they were willing to do _that—”_

“—then a blackmailer couldn’t take advantage of them in the first place.”

“Quite so,” he says. “I hate to say it, but there’s nothing to do but to break into the office and steal back the evidence myself.”

“Ourselves,” Joan corrects him.

Sherlock’s eyes snap to her. _“Myself,”_ he says. “You can’t afford to get caught. You’re trying to get into Columbia; you need a perfect record for that.”

“It’d be safer if there were two of us. You’ve said they were dangerous.”

“They are. Which is why I can’t—”

“If you don’t let me come, I’ll go straight to Principal Harvey.”

Sherlock stares at her. “You’d _tattle.”_ Something that is nearly a smile creeps over his face. “Well, then. I’ll get a second ticket to the Winter Formal. We’re going to use the dance as our cover for being in the school tomorrow night.”

 

Joan hits the thrift shops the next morning—she’s not going to spend her stepfather’s money on a dress for a fake dance—and finds a long gown in midnight blue, suitable for disappearing into the night if she and Sherlock have to run for it. She spends the rest of the afternoon sewing a pair of deep pockets into the skirt’s side seams: why dressmakers assume a girl wants to be _useless_ when she’s wearing a dress, she doesn’t know.

When she meets Sherlock in front of the school, he’s wearing running shoes with his tux. With a grin, she twitches aside the skirt of her dress to show off her own pair of running shoes. She colored them in with a black sharpie so that they wouldn’t be too noticeable under the skirt of her gown; there are still ink smears on her hands.

He laughs. “I see you’re a natural at this sort of thing.” He’s thrumming with energy, obviously looking forward to the evening. She has to admit that she is, too.

They lurk for a while at the dance itself, killing time until the coast is clear. When they finally make their attempt at the nurse’s office, she stands watch while he picks the lock. Once inside, she takes a station near the door, keeping a watch on the hall through the small, wire-impregnated window, while Sherlock absorbs himself with breaking into the filing cabinets. “HIPAA-protected files, Watson! Nobody but the school nurse can get into these without a court order. You’ve seen how fiercely she defends them, and no one thinks to question it. It’s just a matter of finding which drawer…”

But Joan isn’t listening to his monolog, because one of the men involved in the ring—Mr. Charles, the school counselor—has come into the hall, with a key in his hand and his eyes fixed on the door to the nurse’s office. Joan draws back from the window, trusting that the darkness in the office will hide her face, and hisses at Sherlock to kill his flashlight. He does. Mr. Charles keeps coming.

“Hide!” she hisses at Sherlock. He quietly slides the drawer shut, then dashes for the supply closet. There’s just room for both of them. There would be more space in the examination room at the back, but that’s a dead end, and they would have no hope of slipping past Mr. Charles to get to the outer door. They stand there in the dark and wait.

Over the hammering of her heart, Joan can hear _two_ voices. She has no idea who the second voice is, but it’s insistent. She finally sidles out of the closet to see what is happening in the hall; Sherlock grabs at her hand to try to stop her. She shakes him off, and he hisses unhappily. Keeping well back from the light coming through the door’s window, she edges across the room until she can see what is happening.

It’s Marcus Bell in the hall. He’s urgently telling Mr. Charles something, gesticulating down the corridor—not toward the dance, but toward the exit doors at the other end. Mr. Charles seems undecided about whatever Marcus is telling him, but he finally makes up his mind and leads the way to the exterior door. Marcus lets Mr. Charles get a step ahead of him, and then casts a furtive glance back at the medical office, where Joan is standing. She draws back with a start. He holds up two fingers, and nods meaningfully. He knows she’s there, even if he can’t see her.

“Sherlock, _move!”_ she hisses. “Get what you came for! We have two minutes, but I wouldn’t count on longer.”

Sherlock bursts out of the closet and lunges for the cabinets, rifling the files again. He left the cabinets unlocked when they hid, which is fortunate now, but might have been disastrous if Mr. Charles had actually come inside. She keeps an eye on the hallway, twitching with nervousness while she silently counts the time.

“Done,” Sherlock says at long last, sliding the zipper on his pack. She hears him depressing the locking buttons on the wall of filing cabinets, one after another, and then they skitter out into the hallway together. He wants to head for the exit at the end of the hall, but she grabs his hand to turn him back toward the dance, away from where Marcus and Mr. Charles went.

Once inside the dance, Sherlock tries to continue through to the main entrance, but Joan ducks toward a side door. “Watson!” he calls over the music, as he darts to catch up with her. “Where are you going? There’s a shredder at home. The sooner we destroy these, the safer everyone will be.”

Joan waves him off. “You go on. Marcus drew Mr. Charles off, I need to make sure he’s okay.”

Sherlock considers for only a moment. “They went out to the east lot?” At her nod, Sherlock hurries for the side door with her.

Marcus slips inside the door just before they reach it. Joan and Sherlock tumble to a stop in front of him, and Marcus’s face lights up as he recognizes them. “Oh, hey!” he says.

“Hey,” Joan says back, unable to push down the giddiness in her smile. She can _hear_ Sherlock roll his eyes.

“You guys made it back okay! Good. That’s good,” Marcus says.

Sherlock makes a rude noise, and Joan turns to glare at him. “Yes, yes,” Sherlock says, “as we can all see, everyone’s fine.” He pokes his head through the door for a moment. “And Mr. Charles is…?”

“Pretty irritated that we ran a big loop of that end of the school without finding any sign of a fight. I held him as long as I could, but last I saw he was headed back to the nurse’s office again. What were you guys doing in there?”

“He’s going to be worse than irritated in a moment,” Joan warns, cutting a look at Sherlock.

Sherlock nods tightly. “And you had best not be here when he gets back” he agrees, looking at Marcus, “Safest if you come with us. I’m sorry, Watson, I know Bell here was hoping for a dance with you, but there will be other dances. Prom, perhaps.”

“Wait, _what?”_ Joan shouts after his retreating back. She turns to Marcus, who shifts uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, he sometimes—”

“No, no, it’s fine, it was clear pretty quick that you weren’t here to dance.”

Joan stares at him a moment.

Sherlock indignantly stalks back across the dance floor to them. “Mr. Charles is about to come back in that door, and it would be a very good thing if he didn’t see us all together.” He turns to Marcus. “He’s part of a blackmailing ring. We were stealing back the evidence he and his associates have been using to terrorize people.”

Marcus holds his ground. “What you’re gonna do with it?”

“Shred it, of course,” Sherlock growls, “if we ever manage to get to a shredder.” He turns for the main entrance again.

Marcus looks to Joan for confirmation. “We can’t take it to the police,” Joan elaborates, following Sherlock. Marcus falls in beside her. “Not without hurting the victims further. This way,  we can at least put the blackmailers out of business for a while.”

“Well, that’s a comfort to know. If I’m going to get a juvie record for abetting trespassing and burglary, I want it to be for a good cause.”

“Burgling for justice,” Joan smirks. “That’s us.”

Sherlock groans as he pushes through the school’s front doors.

Joan skips out ahead of him, running down the front steps to the rainwashed pavement. The light from the streetlamps gleams gold, just like in the song.

Marcus’s footsteps chase down the stairs behind her, the hard soles of his shoes rasping on the concrete. “ _Comes up clean and fresh and cold…”_ he sings quietly, just audible over the muffled thrum of the dance, and she whirls to look at him. “Sorry,” he says, coming to a stop beside her with an embarrassed smile, “we just closed a show last week.”

“Oh, she knows,” Sherlock says as he passes them. “She saw it three times.”

Joan doesn’t embarrass easily—she and Sherlock could never have become friends if she did—but her cheeks heat anyway.

“Yeah?” Marcus asks her. His eyes are hopeful.

She shrugs, trying for casual. “You're a better Obediah than Brando was.”

His smile is delighted, but when she smiles back at him, he can only hold her eyes a few moments before he looks down in sudden shyness. It’s charming, but also contagious, and soon she’s looking away, too. After another few moments of uncoordinated dithering, they run the few steps to catch up with Sherlock again.

“So,” Marcus says, falling into step beside Sherlock, “blackmailing ring? You're serious?"

Sherlock nods. "Can't show you the evidence without further compromising the victims' privacy, but yes."

Marcus considers that a moment. "So stealing back the evidence is good, but how do you keep them from starting up again? Or from coming after us, for that matter? Does Mr. Charles have reason to think either of you are mixed up in this?”

Sherlock turns a startled glance on Marcus, then looks him over, head to toe. He looks across to Joan. She shrugs back at him: all-hands-in quick thinking is part of the thrill of running across rooftops with Sherlock, and given Marcus's leap of faith in the hallway earlier, he looks as if he’ll keep up fine.

Sherlock raises an eyebrow at her and turns back to Marcus. “Excellent question,” he says, with the false grouchiness he sometimes uses when he’s pleased. “We have all day tomorrow to figure it out.”


	4. Splashing Bright in Sunlight (roadtrip; childhood)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It feels like love to you,” she said, and Marcus smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fluff, but content warning for drowning. Approx 900 words.
> 
> Set several years after [Foundations](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1175130), but you only need to know two things: established Joanbell, and Marcus's arm never got much better than what we saw in 2x11, "Internal Audit."
> 
> Orig posted [at tumblr](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/93713540693/prompt-marcus-childhood).

Marcus executed a long, low dive into the motel pool, his bad fist clasped in his good one. It was an inelegant entry, punching through the water’s surface with an asymmetric splash, but it still worked as a dive, so he called it a victory. He had only done a few laps of the pool, experimenting with a stroke that would let him get some pull with his bad arm, despite his inability to close those fingers tight, when he was interrupted by a high, piercing voice.  _“Marcus!”_

The pool gate clanged behind Naz, and Marcus pulled for the shallower end of the pool. He distantly heard Olivia calling after her son not to run, and then the boy flung himself at the water, limbs wide-flung and flailing.

Marcus ducked his head against the splash, then gathered his feet under himself and surged at Naz with a mock growl. The boy shrieked with joy and paddled away from Marcus, graceless but confident, then shrieked again as Marcus caught him around the waist. Naz sucked in a great whooping breath and the two went tumbling through the water together, splashing and flailing, before Marcus let the boy kick free of him. Naz popped to the surface, struggling to catch his breath through his laughter. Marcus let the boy breathe for a moment and used the window to quietly glide across the pool toward where Joan sat on the deck, her feet dangling in the water and head turned away to greet Marcus’s cousin. Marcus sent a wave rolling across them both.

Joan shouted, then turned a narrow-eyed glare on Marcus. “You are going to regret that,” she threatened.

Marcus grinned, kicking hard away from the pool edge. “Counting on it,” he said, and then Naz wound his arms tight around Marcus’s neck and tried to push him under.

By the time he disentangled himself from Naz, both Joan and Olivia had joined Operation Drown Marcus, and the four-way waterfight was on, alliances forming and reforming with quicksilver speed. It lasted until another set of motel guests came out, at which point Joan heaved herself out of the water to go back to her book and deck chair, and Naz and Marcus switched to a different game, Marcus dolphining underwater from one side of the pool to the other, while Naz clung to his shoulders.

***

Back in their motel room again, Joan combed conditioner through her hair, grousing quietly about the havoc the chlorine would wreak on it. Marcus watched her lazily from the bed. He would be hungry enough to eat two horses when he finally roused himself to move, but for now he was content to sprawl.

“He’s a good swimmer, Naz,” Joan said after a while. “I wasn’t anything like that confident in the water at his age.”

“It’s a Pembleton thing,” Marcus said, before his brain quite caught up with his mouth. But she had come down to Baltimore with him to come to his uncle’s annual reunion and cookout: she obviously wasn’t put off by family stuff.

“What, you’re all born with webbed toes?” she teased.

“I had an uncle who drowned when he was a kid,” Marcus said, and Joan turned to look at him. “A lot of families might stay away from the water after something like that, but not Nana. Wasn’t always money for food, not to hear them tell it, but she found money for swimming lessons. And then when her kids grew up, they made sure us-all had swimming lessons, too. Every Saturday, summer and winter, Andre and I would be down at the Y. The same with Olivia and Little Frank, though down here. Looks like Olivia has been doing the same again with Naz.”

Joan took that in for a moment. Marcus shut his eyes, too languid to bother with having them open.

“You wouldn’t know there’s a shadow like that behind it, watching all of you,” Joan finally said.

“Mm,” Marcus acknowledged, still half-asleep with contentment. “Uncle Bobby’s still kinda messed up about it, don’t get me wrong. But the rest of us…” Marcus twitched a shoulder, trying to figure out how to put it. “Nana and Mama loved us enough to make sure we’d never drown. Anything else might happen — and some of it did —” to Andre, especially, and Mama had done everything she could to stop that, “but come hell or high water, Mama and Nana could at least make sure we didn’t drown.”

Joan went back to sliding the comb through her hair, slow and thoughtful. “It feels like love to you,” she said, and Marcus smiled. That’s exactly what it felt like, playing in the pool with his brother, his mother, his cousins and aunts and uncles. He never was happy on a road trip unless he could get a motel room with a pool, because you didn’t pass that up, if you had a choice.

“Wanna go get some dinner?” he asked.

“Not just yet,” Joan said, and crawled up the bed next to him, angling her head sideways to keep her wet hair away from his face. He turned toward her, and she leaned over him to kiss him. When she pulled back, he closed his eyes, listening to her settle on the pillow next to him. He nuzzled against her cheek for a moment, lazy and happy. Her skin still smelled of chlorine, and behind his eyelids water arced through the sky, splashing bright in sunlight.


End file.
